by John Prados
In part, history has burdened William F. Halsey with an impossible mission. The three task groups of Third Fleet spent most of that day circling the waters where the Princeton fight took place. This put the fleet roughly 260 nautical miles from the San Bernardino Strait. If Halsey’s message had been an action order, and Vice Admiral Lee had separated his task force in, say, two hours (very quick) and made the run to San Bernardino Strait at twenty-four knots—a fast fleet speed—Task Force 34 could have arrived off the San Bernardino at about 6:00 a.m. on October 25, five hours after the Kurita fleet passed that way.
At this moment the Kurita fleet had already attacked farther south. To block Kurita and force a battle, Ching Lee would have had to steam the whole way at a full battle speed of thirty-three knots. But four of the six battleships in Lee’s force were not rated higher than twenty-eight knots. His choices would have been to go hell-for-leather, dropping ships along the way, and reaching the San Bernardino with just the Iowa and New Jersey, or to make a stern chase after Kurita had passed into the Pacific. There were questions either way.
Part of the lambasting Halsey has endured comes from his Seventh Fleet counterparts who assumed the Third Fleet commander had issued an action order. They are not the only ones. Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur thought the same. Some of Halsey’s own officers, including operations chief Brigadier General William Riley and radio unit boss Commander Gilven Slonim, thought, at the evening operations conference, that Task Force 34 would be together before morning. They were right, but it was not for the purpose of going after Kurita.
The storm over “Bull’s Run” comes to a point when we discover that Admiral Halsey actually knew that Kurita had turned around and was headed east once more. Most disturbing of all—and missing from standard accounts of Leyte Gulf—were a pair of Pearl Harbor dispatches marked “Ultra. From CINCPAC,” and “This is Ultra from CINCPAC,” which were sent during the night and recorded radio direction-finding fixes for the locations of Japanese naval radio transmissions inside or on the Pacific side of the San Bernardino. Nimitz sent both messages to Halsey for “action.” They originated close to dawn.
Nimitz’s use of the word “Ultra” in these messages was a grave breach of security. It can only be explained as an attempt to indicate the authoritative source of the information and simultaneously demand, without actually saying so, urgent action. That Nimitz would take the risk of compromising the Ultra source in an operational message is astonishing. It is also an index of how serious he deemed the situation to be.
None of those warnings, however, induced Admiral Halsey to change his mind. When he did form Lee’s fast battleship force, it was for the same purpose Ozawa had used Rear Admiral Matsuda’s hybrid vessels, as an advance guard. Soon news began to flow, interspersed with Third Fleet pilots’ tallyhos! On sighting the vaunted Japanese carriers anew, Halsey was anxious to be at them.
Admirals Nimitz, Kinkaid, and everyone else ought to have been in no doubt regarding Halsey’s intentions. Ten days before, at the height of the Taiwan battle sequence, the Third Fleet commander had briefly been distracted by the appearance of a Japanese force (Shima, misidentified as representing the forward echelon of the carriers) and had had to be prodded by Kinkaid and called back by Nimitz. On the twenty-first, Halsey had complained of his operations being restricted by the need to cover Leyte. He had wanted freedom for more offensive action. CINCPAC had called him to task again. But Halsey had a basic order that allowed him to make a Japanese fleet his target, if one materialized—and his experience taught him that aircraft carriers were the heart of fleets. Now that he had carriers in front of him, there was nothing else he could arguably do but go after them.
The irony here is very sharp. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf both sides made a mistake. Moreover, both sides made the same mistake. And each made its mistake for the same reason! The Japanese let the desire to attack fleets get in the way of their asserted goal of destroying invasion forces, and they did it because tradition taught that fleets must be the primary target. Bill Halsey left the San Bernardino Strait unguarded because he wanted to keep his force together to attack the enemy carrier fleet he had learned was the main threat.
The Third Fleet commander, enjoying the chase, waited on news of his first strike wave when other reports began to flood in. At 6:48 a.m. on October 25—almost precisely the moment the Japanese began attacking off Samar—Halsey received word of Kinkaid’s fight in the Surigao Strait. The Seventh Fleet chief added a question: “IS TF34 GUARDING SAN BERNARDINO STRAIT?” Halsey’s reply that it was not stunned Kinkaid.
Then, at 8:22 a.m., Halsey got the delayed news of Japanese battleships and cruisers attacking jeep carrier units outside Leyte Gulf. That had been sent in real time, of course, at 7:07. Only eight minutes later came Kinkaid’s appeal, “FAST BATTLESHIPS ARE URGENTLY NEEDED AT LEYTE GULF AT ONCE.” Around nine o’clock, with the Seventh Fleet’s jeep carriers almost on the ropes, Halsey learned Kinkaid’s details of the Kurita fleet and its attack, with further messages asking for immediate strikes by carriers and the fast battleships.
Bill Halsey replied that he was engaging the Japanese carriers and that he had ordered Slew McCain to the aid of the Seventh Fleet. Halsey added his position, thus indicating the physical impossibility of fast battleships helping Kinkaid. The Third Fleet boss also wondered at another Kinkaid dispatch, one delayed in transit, revealing that Seventh Fleet had expended much ammunition at Surigao. Halsey describes this as “so astonishing I could hardly accept it,” implying that had he known he would have acted differently.
Three things are worth comment. First, the earliest Kinkaid could have realized his ammunition situation would have been before dawn, say, about 4:15 a.m., following the Surigao cannonade—and probably a bit later due to the time required to take inventory. That coincided with the moment in the predawn hours that Vice Admiral Lee finished assembling Task Force 34, so Halsey could have sent them immediately, but the distance to San Bernardino from where Third Fleet happened to be, roughly the same as the previous afternoon, would have consumed about the same transit time. Within those parameters Admiral Lee might have been able to intervene by six in the afternoon—still too late to do any good. In his responses to Kinkaid’s increasingly anxious appeals, Halsey was already making the “too late to do anything”–type argument. There is no reason to suppose that, resistant to sending Lee’s battleships, the Third Fleet commander would have done so now. Halsey’s account seems aimed at the reader.
Second, delays kept the message from Admiral Halsey for hours after the Surigao fight. The Third Fleet’s admiral records getting this information at 9:22 a.m. Not only did this automatically hold up a Third Fleet response, but the delay was entirely avoidable. Because MacArthur’s communications plan provided for messages between the fleets to go over SOWESPAC circuits, the Kinkaid dispatch went to a radio relay station at Manus, and there joined a queue to be re-sent in the order received. This delay cost vital time.
The other thing is that Admiral Kinkaid was being disingenuous too. His big ships had plenty more ammunition than he let on. Exhaustive postwar study by the Naval War College established that the Seventh Fleet battleships at Surigao expended a total of 282 14- and 16-inch shells in the battle. After the fight—and counting only armor-piercing shells—Kinkaid’s ships still had about 300 16-inch and almost 1,100 14-inch rounds. He was certainly not out of ammunition. The best you can make of this from Kinkaid’s point of view is to say he must not have known his ships’ status right after the battle. But if not, he had no business making that claim. What was true—that the Seventh Fleet battleships in Surigao were at the opposite end of Leyte Gulf from the new threat, probably five hours away—was a point Kinkaid’s messages did not make.
The tone in Seventh Fleet dispatches became increasingly desperate. At about 10:00 a.m., Kinkaid sent a message in the clear, not even bothering to encode it: “WHERE IS LEE. SEND LEE.”
Then came the message that has reverberated down the years, sent by Admiral Chester Nimitz, not Kinkaid. “WHERE IS REPEAT WHERE IS TASK FORCE 34. THE WORLD WONDERS. TURKEY TROTS TO WATER.”
Halsey could not believe that CINCPAC would send him such a message, and he was right. The confusion arose because anonymous communications officers, when preparing the signal, padded it with spurious text to confuse enemy code breakers. The “turkey trots” language had been obvious filler, but the “world wants to know” part was so close to the true events of the situation that radiomen on flagship New Jersey, worried it might be actual text, left it in. The filler contained an implied criticism. Commander Slonim pointed that out to Halsey.
Bill Halsey felt like Nimitz had hit him in the face. He turned red, threw his cap on the deck, and demanded to know how Nimitz dared. Admiral Carney ran up and grabbed Halsey’s arm. He practically did slap the fleet commander in the face.
“Stop it!” the chief of staff exclaimed. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Pull yourself together!”
Halsey stalked off to his cabin with Mick Carney right behind him.
• • •
THE THIRD FLEET commander might have been right, but the world did want to know about this battle, this key battle, upon which so much depended. Perhaps not the whole world, but at least Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which, from an American naval officer’s point of view, amounted to the same thing.
FDR had a command center called the Map Room. A Navy captain, John L. McCrea, had set it up in early 1942, starting with just two file cabinets, situated on the ground floor of the White House, next to the Diplomatic Reception Room. President Roosevelt often stopped by in the morning or at night, or both.
Many, many messages, dispatches reflecting developments in every theater of the war, flowed through the president’s Map Room. The duty officer made choices as to which ones to plot on maps, which to post on bulletin boards, and what simply went to file. FDR had been attentive to the Pacific action since the onset of the Taiwan air battle. Unlike Winston Churchill and his Soviet or German counterparts, Roosevelt almost never put his hand directly into naval or military affairs. In the Pacific war, he had not done so between a certain moment in the Guadalcanal campaign, late in 1942, and the recent conference President Roosevelt had held at Pearl Harbor. But seeing the traffic on the Taiwan battle, the president had sent a cable to Admiral Halsey congratulating the Third Fleet.
Map Room officers posted dispatches reporting the landings in Leyte Gulf, and they continued to follow the Japanese reaction. When the sub Darter saw the Kurita fleet and reported its movements, it would be posted in the Map Room. Copies of subsequent reports were circulated or posted too, including one of the Ozawa carrier force and another of the Nishimura unit. The president thus knew about all three major Japanese fleet units.
In the evening on October 24, the message containing the aerial sighting of the Japanese carriers would be not only posted, but forwarded to Mr. Roosevelt and to his naval aide, Admiral Wilson Brown. Kinkaid’s brief notice that he was engaging Imperial Navy surface forces in the Surigao Strait would be hand-carried to the president. CINCPAC’s Ultra messages giving positions on the Pacific side of the Philippines were stamped “SPECIAL DISTRIBUTION” at the Map Room. So, FDR knew about the security breach too. When the Japanese fell upon vulnerable jeep carriers, the Map Room exhibited great concern. A staffer annotated the initial message in that series with the location of the action and the local time in the Philippines.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt also wanted to know the answer to the question Chester Nimitz put to William F. Halsey. Later, he put Map Room analysts to work on a chronology explaining the precise sequence of events at Leyte Gulf. But the president said nothing in public.
• • •
IN FLAG PLOT on the New Jersey the mood darkened quickly with the parade of messages. Despite the excitement of the chase and the destruction of Ozawa, news of an emergency down south and Kinkaid’s appeals for fast battleships caused concern. Faces paled at the idea that the emergency might have something to do with Third Fleet decisions. And now Nimitz’s admonition made the situation clear. Mick Carney returned after nearly an hour with Halsey, bearing orders to turn the fast battleships around. Intelligence officer Carl Solberg recalled, “Halsey had no choice. . . . He had to comply.” At 10:52 a.m., Vice Admiral Lee with Task Force 34 began turning south accompanied by Admiral Bogan’s carriers.
The forces were on the new heading by 11:15 a.m. Bill Halsey’s next message warned they could not arrive in the Leyte area before about eight the following morning. No exaggeration—at this point the Halsey force lay roughly 440 nautical miles from the San Bernardino Strait. Even at twenty-four knots that meant more than eighteen hours, which put arrival at 7:00 a.m., and Leyte lay even farther away. What actually happened was that Admiral Lee refueled destroyers and then divided his force, with fast battleships Iowa and New Jersey sent ahead at very high speed to sweep the approaches to the San Bernardino during the night, then proceed along the coast of Samar to Leyte. The main force took the direct route to Leyte.
The Third Fleet commander instructed Admiral Lee to detach four cruisers and ten destroyers to join Ted Sherman’s Task Group 38.3. Admiral Sherman had felt little effect from the withdrawal of ships of his escort that had gone to Task Force 34. Sherman writes that he preferred to pose a surface threat to Ozawa, recommending to Pete Mitscher that this ad hoc surface action group be committed to the chase. E. B. Potter, biographer of Mitscher’s staff chief Arleigh Burke, contends that Sherman’s suggestion was not for a surface pursuit but for ships to take derelict carrier Chiyoda in tow, and that Mitscher’s idea was to attack instead. Admiral Mitscher issued that order at 2:15 p.m.
Be that as it may, the last three strike waves of the Battle of Cape Engaño thus occurred in tandem with a surface pursuit. Under Rear Admiral Laurance T. DuBose, four cruisers and nine destroyers made speed toward the enemy. They came up on the Chiyoda just as the air coordinator, Ted Winters, was heading back to roost. Commander Winters supplied DuBose with the right bearing to reach the Japanese ship and stayed a bit longer to spot the fall of shot for the surface attackers. About 4:25 p.m., the U.S. warships began shooting. The Chiyoda went to her final resting place half an hour later. There were no known survivors.
DuBose resumed his pursuit. By now the Ozawa fleet, its vessels having sustained varying amounts of damage or mechanical malfunctions, were strung out over many miles. Admiral DuBose worried about a continuation of the pursuit. Ozawa had two battleships, after all, and his strongest vessel was a heavy cruiser. But Admiral Mitscher persisted. The cruiser-destroyer group steamed on into the gathering dusk. DuBose, helped by a couple of night fighters from the Essex, got a bead on several Japanese destroyers in the twilight. Led by the Hatsuzuki, the Japanese ships were picking up survivors from Ozawa’s sunken carriers. The American cruisers commenced firing at 6:52 p.m. The Hatsuzuki, wearing the pennant of Captain Amano Shigetaka, who led a destroyer division, maneuvered as if she were launching torpedoes. Taking no chances, DuBose turned away to evade. Both sides repeated that maneuver, and the American admiral ordered his own destroyers to attack with torpedoes. The cruiser force resumed firing at 14,000 yards’ range and steadily drove nearer. Hatsuzuki held on as Captain Amano played for time for the other escorts to escape. The cruisers stopped shooting and the Japanese destroyer sank at nearly nine o’clock.
Though the engagement with the U.S. cruisers marked the last contact with Third Fleet, it might not have been. From the Oyodo, lookouts could see the horizon lit by gun flashes to the south. At 7:52 p.m., Admiral Ozawa received Captain Amano’s report of a surface engagement. Always one to support his men, Ozawa turned back to support the embattled Hatsuzuki. The cool Ozawa regrouped Matsuda’s two battleships—just as the American DuBose had feared—with Oyodo, and the destroyer Shimotsuki, coming to a heading just west of south at a
bout 9:30. Having just had his entire carrier force blown out from under him, Ozawa wanted to fight. On the way down, the Wakatsuki, one of Amano’s survivors, joined up. They continued searching for DuBose until just before midnight, when Ozawa reluctantly retraced his steps and headed for safety.
Considering the actions of top Imperial Navy commanders, in the context of Ozawa’s historical studies, he seems very much like a Japanese Franz von Hipper, the precise and careful leader of the German battle cruisers at the Jutland battle the young officer had studied so assiduously.
SUBMARINE ALARMS
Ozawa’s defiant turnback marked the last act of the aero-naval battle between his main body and Halsey’s Third Fleet. But it was not the end of the ordeal for this element of the Japanese force. Now came the submarine offensive.
The Allied submarine campaigns, incredibly damaging to Tokyo’s hopes, had progressed to the point where commanders had sectioned off Pacific geography into broad areas in which not only individual subs but also so-called wolfpacks assumed patrol positions. Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood led the submarine fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor, and he had two wolfpacks totaling six boats to the east of the Philippines at the time of the Leyte battle. Both were headed for the region the Allies called “Convoy College,” basically off the northern edge of the Philippines, in the Luzon Strait. The zone around Leyte and to the north had been ruled off-limits to subs because of the invasion.
But when Admiral Lockwood learned of the high probability that there would be a carrier battle off Cape Engaño, he asked CINCPAC for permission to send his wolfpacks into the proscribed waters. Chester Nimitz denied the request. The on-scene commander, Admiral Mitscher, however, was happy to get submarine cooperation. Subs had been major contributors to hurting the Japanese at the Philippine Sea battle, and as early as Midway, submarines had offered a helping hand in a carrier battle. Mitscher sent a message inviting help, which led Admiral Nimitz to relent. Unfortunately, all this happened too late for the subs to take full advantage, although they would still prove to be a thorn in the sides of their enemies.
